1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a wire harness for connecting electrical equipment, and more particularly to a technique for making a wire harness compact and reducing the number of times connectors are fitted.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In a conventional wire harness, a system is adopted in which the wire harness is divided into a plurality of blocks, and the blocks are respectively designed and fabricated as a unit. Namely, a one-block wire harness 30 shown in FIG. 4 is provided with main junction boxes 32a and 32b at opposite ends of a trunk line 31. The one-block harness 30 is connectable to wire harnesses, or the like, of other blocks.
Further, a multiplicity of branch lines 33a to 33h branch off from the trunk line 31 by being spliced to required wires of the trunk line 31 (by connecting the wires). These branch lines are each provided with a connector 34 or a sub-junction box 35, and secondary branch lines 36a to 36c are spliced to the branch line 33e, as necessary.
This wire harness 30 is arranged to be connected to electrical equipment or wire harnesses of other blocks by means of the main junction boxes 32a and 32b, the sub-junction boxes 35, the connectors 34, and the like.
However, with such a conventional wire harness, it has been necessary to provide a plurality of connector-accommodating portions inside the junction boxes in order to fit a plurality of connectors by means of the junction boxes. In a case where the number of connections of the connectors is numerous, the junction boxes become large in size, which has been a factor substantially reducing the degree of freedom in the installation of the wire harness.
In addition, since the branching of the route is effected mainly by the junction boxes, the number of connections of the connectors naturally increases. For this reason, not only does the assembling operation using the wire harness become complicated, but there are cases where measures for waterproofing, dust prevention, abnormal noise, and so forth are required in connector-connecting portions, which constitute an important factor for increasing costs.
Meanwhile, although it is possible to make the wire harness compact by forming the branches by splicing, since the splicing itself is a difficult process, the number of processes for fabricating the wire harness increases, and there arise problems which make the automatic assembly of the wire harness difficult.